Welcome to Transfigurations! This blog is intended to serve the orthodox Anglican community and the wider Christian community. We pray that all that is posted here will be faithful to the Scriptures as the inspired word of God, speak the truth in love, edify, bless and transform this local body of Christ, and be an impetus for revival, repentance, prayer and intercession!

Monday, January 13, 2014

Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare
Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them. The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers.

For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation. Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to funnel $1,071,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1.071 trillion) over the next decade (2014 to 2023) from American taxpayers, through Washington, to health insurance companies. It’s even worse that Obamacare is trying to coerce Americans into buying those same insurers’ product (although there are escape routes). It’s almost unbelievable that it will also subsidize those same insurers’ losses...

Voter fraud in Texas and New York
...New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures...

Albert Mohler: The End of Morality Laws? Not Exactly
...Turley wants the law to continue to have sanctions against bestiality and incest. Why bestiality? Well, he says, there are obvious consent issues and very real harm. What about incest? He says laws against incest are not morality laws, but rather matters of health. Well let’s look at that for just a moment. That’s an argument that has been used before, but it can’t hold water. What about couples who are beyond the ages of childbearing? The medical issues related to incest have to do with a far-greater likelihood of genetic abnormalities in the offspring of closely-related couples. But if those closely-related couples—brother and sister, mother and son, father and daughter, or any kind of permutation thereabouts—if that intimate pair is beyond the age of childbearing, then what is the medical issue? It disappears. Nevertheless, Mr. Turley is not advocating the striking down of laws against incest. Why? It is because what he’s actually promoting is the progressive striking down of one set of laws and then another: first the laws against same-sex marriage; then the laws against plural marriage. Even he wants some morality laws to remain, but he claims to celebrate the end of all morals legislation...

A defining moment for the court
...Monday’s argument will be another manifestation of America’s intermittent efforts to tame executive power, efforts that predate nationhood: The Declaration of Independence is a menu of complaints against “a long train of abuses and usurpations” by “the present King of Great Britain.” The present president’s cavalier approach to statutes (as with his unilateral rewriting of the Affordable Care Act) and the Constitution (see four paragraphs above) make Monday’s argument important...

Why Egypt's Christian Families Are Paying Ransoms
...Coptic bishop Kyrillos of Nag Hammadi, 300 miles south of Cairo, recently held a press conference to complain of 34 kidnapping cases in his diocese since the revolution. Of these, 11 were returned after ransom payments, which totaled $435,000...